Category: Corals

Hong Kong Post unveiled a series of new postal stamps this week, including a set featuring Hong Kong’s rich marine biodiversity designed by Shirman Lai . Revealing our beautiful underwater world, this six-piece issue aims to promote awareness for marine conservation in the hope of making joint efforts to preserve our precious marine life. For extra fun, the souvenir sheet features fish-shape perforations to match the overall fish silhouette. Among others the stamp features the Chinese White dolphin, stingrays, corals green sea turtles and jellyfish.

The Hong Kong Underwater Photo and Video Competition, in its 6th year now, received 436 entries this year, featuring marine ecology, habitats and marine life in Hong Kong waters.

An AFCD spokesman said, “Entries over the years have showcased the beauty of marine life and habitats in Hong Kong waters, and have helped promote the conservation of the marine environment.”

The event comprised a photo competition and a video competition. There were two categories in the photo competition, namely the Macro and Close-up Category and the Standard and Wide Angle Category. In addition to prizes for champions and runners-up in each group, there were Special Prizes for Junior Underwater Photographers presented by the judging panel to encourage less experienced underwater photographers to participate in the competition.

Please click the thumbnail images to enlarge.

Champion – Macro & Close up Group ” 海 鮮 大 餐 ” by LAU Pong Wing Atim

1st Runner-up Macro & Close up Group ” 地 獄 槍 蝦 ” by YIU King Fung Sam

2nd Runner-up Macro & Close up Group ” I am tiny but I yawn big ” by KAM Ching Man Vania

Special Prize for Junior Underwater Photographer Macro & Close up Group ” 害 羞 的 魚 ” by YIU King Fung Sam

The Hong Kong Underwater Photo and Video Competition, in its 5th year now, received 443 entries this year, featuring marine ecology, habitats and marine life in Hong Kong waters.

An AFCD spokesman said, “Entries over the years have showcased the beauty of marine life and habitats in Hong Kong waters, and have helped promote the conservation of the marine environment.”

The event comprised a photo competition and a video competition. In the photo competition the categories were Macros/Close-ups and Standard/Wide Angle. In addition to prizes for champions and runners-up in each group, there were Special Prizes for Junior Underwater Photographers presented by the judging panel to encourage less experienced underwater photographers to participate in the competition.

According to a recent FT.com article the company responsible for most of the destruction of coral reefs and reef habitat in the disputed Spratly Islands is listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange and is planning an overseas listing.

China Communications Construction Company (HK:1800), a large state-owned infrastructure group, announced in March that it was integrating its three dredging assets into a new company, CCCC Dredging, which it would eventually list overseas. That entity was set up in Shanghai’s Free Trade Zone on Wednesday.

China’s dredging programme has created about half a dozen islands in the South China Sea with deepwater harbours and at least one airstrip.

In the past 18 months, according to the US defence secretary, at least 2,000 acres of land have been reclaimed — more than has been done in 60 years by other claimants to the territory, including Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Satellite images analysed by IHS Jane’s, the defence consultancy, show that Tianjin Dredging Company, one of CCCC Dredging’s three subsidiaries, operates most of the giant barges that have been digging sand from the seabed and piling it on remote coral atolls with names such as Mischief Reef, Suba Reef and Fiery Cross.

The flotation plans are curious for secretive Tianjin. A listing would require greater transparency and focus more attention on its activities.

In March CCCC said in a filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, where it has been listed since 2006, that it “intends to seek listing of CCCC Dredging overseas at an appropriate market timing”.

Hongkongers and potential overseas investors should be aware that CCCC is not an ethical investment.

It is not just China destroying reefs in the South China Sea by reclaiming land to form island outposts to boost territorial claims. Vietnam is also reclaiming land by dumping enormous amounts of sand on two reefs destroying coral communities and changing the local ecology and likely adversely affecting fish stocks.

The photographs, shared with Reuters by Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), show an expansion of the land area of Vietnamese-controlled Sand Cay and West London Reef in the Spratly archipelego and the addition of buildings.

Sandy Cay (largest islet in the image) is small islet in the South China Sea occupied by Vietnam. it is visited by seabirds and was home to a rich marine diversity.

The director of CSIS’s Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (http://amti.csis.org/), said the work included military installations and appeared to have started before China began a flurry of reclamation projects last year. “On one site, it has constructed a significant new area that was formerly under water and at another it has used land reclamation to add acreage to an existing island,” Rapp-Hooper said.

The images showed that Vietnam had reclaimed about 65,000 square meters (699,654 square feet) of land at West London Reef and 21,000 square meters (226,042 square feet) at Sand Cay. This compared to 900,000 square meters (9.6 million square feet) reclaimed by China at a single reef, Fiery Cross.

Satellite images show that since about March 2014, China had conducted reclamation work at seven sites in the Spratlys and was constructing a military-sized air strip on one artificial island and possibly a second on another.

It appears that claimants to the South China Sea have entered into a land building race that destroys ecology and depletes fish stocks as a result. There can be no real winners in such a race – everybody will lose.

Photographs posted online recently show Chinese tourists posing with endangered species off the Paracel Islands, a disputed area of the South China Sea. Tourists were posing with red coral, thresher sharks and other fish according to the China News Service . All three thresher shark species have been recently listed as vulnerable to extinction by the World Conservation Union (IUCN).

The photos were widely condemned by internet users on the mainland, and raised concerns among conservationists.

The Crescent Group of the Paracel Islands (Image: WikiCommons)

The authorities have since pledged to crack down on “illegal tourist activity”. Feng Wenhai, the deputy mayor of Sansha said that a task force of police, national security agencies and the coastguard would target illegal tourism boats operating in the area. Other officials and fishermen would apparently also carry out patrols to search for such boats according to Feng.

A tour operator in Hainan province who arranges trips to the Paracel Islands told the South China Morning Post that tourists who wanted to go fishing often chartered illegal boats costing much more than authorised cruises. “They need to find their own charter vessels and gather enough people as the cost is quite high, normally tens of thousands of yuan,” he said.

In 2012, amid intensifying territorial disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea, China established the city of Sansha to administer the disputed Paracels – known as Xisha in Chinese – and the disputed Spratly Islands and the Macclesfield Bank in the South China Sea. That was two years after the Chinese authorities announced plans to develop the tourism industry in the Paracels.

Map showing the position of the Paracels Islands in the South China Sea (Image: WikiCommons)

The first tourist cruises in 2013 were run by state-owned operators aboard the “Coconut Princess” and set sail from Sanya , the capital of Hainan Island. The four-day, three-night cruises to three of the islets cost from 4,000 yuan (HK$5,000) to 10,000 yuan. However, they are only open to mainland Chinese – foreigners, tourists from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan and those with criminal records are not allowed.

In the space of three months China has turned the reef into an island by dredging soil and sand from the seabed and dumping it on top. The island, shown in a satellite image obtained by IHS, will be large enough to accommodate China’s first airstrip in the Spratly Islands when completed.

“The land reclamation at Fiery Cross is the fourth such project undertaken by China in the Spratly Islands in the last 12-18 months and by far the largest in scope,” the report said.

A harbour is also under construction to the east of the reef, which appears to have the capacity for tankers and naval warships.

The Spratly Islands are claimed by China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam and Brunei. All but Brunei have asserted their own claims by building structures on reefs and shoals.

State-run Global Times said the reclamation projects had been undertaken to improve living conditions for soldiers stationed in the South China Sea, quoting an anonymous commander. The commander said land reclamation was necessary because soldiers had been forced to patrol in sea water as their stations occupied most of the available space on reefs and were too confined.

Boo-hoo, the station is too cramped, so let’s destroy a coral reef by smothering it with sediment. Clearly no one mentioned the environmental damage and loss of fisheries to the military. All this while countries like Australia are trying to save reefs…its sad day for planet Earth again.